I'm doing political analysis across redistricting cycles, and need to do a lot of data manipulation. I need to split up precincts, do updates, joins, calculations, etc... I'll need a method that is able to handle a table of 500k census blocks. I just bought the home version of ArcGIS.
Should I try to store the data and do the manipulation using the internal .gdb file? That seems the easiest, but I have no idea if it's possible to do SQL-like updates and manipulations. I haven't been able to find the answer in the docs.
I'll need to do:
update table set this = that
create table as (select * from table1, table2 where someclause)
If ArcGIS is not capable of this, what do most people do instead?